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How to Replace IMAP

gaborcselle.com

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Re: How to Replace IMAP

#51

Post by JoachimSchipper »

gaborcselle wrote: post #31
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #18

This is a collection of the author's favourite technologies/gripes, not a useful proposal. A large number of errors can be found by considering that it'll have to talk SMTP on the back end. I'll only point to some "highlights". OAuth isn't nearly secure enough ( http://hueniverse.com/2009/04/explaining-the-oauth-session-f... ) for your e-mail (which, don't forget, gives access to everything via password resets). Let'…

Thanks for your suggestions Joachim! This is why I wrote that blog entry in the first place: To get some high-quality feedback. I think IMAP could be replaced independently of SMTP. You could conceivable replace an IMAP server with a reMAP server and not affect the rest of the mail ecosystem. SMTP will likely not die for another hundred years. 1. I know about the OAuth problems. Do you think we'll see a more secure s…

First off, thanks for taking this well. It was a bit of a rant, even if it was toned down from the first version. Sorry.

We agree SMTP will be around forever; but how do you plan on abolishing MIME then? Your system will have to handle it, no matter what. Do you want to push MIME handling to the server? IMAP already does that, there's nothing revolutionary about that.

Due to the special structure, it's usually possible to distinguish UTF-8 from other 8-bit text. The tricky part is what to do with unmarked non-UTF-8 8-bit text - it could be pretty much anything. Mutt, for instance, allows the user to configure this according to what the user expects to see. Quoting the manual,

    For example, Japanese users might prefer this:
    set assumed_charset="iso-2022-jp:euc-jp:shift_jis:utf-8"
There is a lot more information about such things on the Mutt site. Basically, Mutt tries to parse the headers/message according to a specific character set and falls back to the next one if that fails.

I probably wouldn't trust my e-mail to a protocol that was only a few years old. I don't anticipate any new security protocols with significant uptake either; "serious" stuff already uses SSL/TLS plus an authentication method (passwords/certificates/SASL), and the web crowd is unlikely to replace that (OAuth is about weakening security in a controlled way, not replacing SSL.)

And yeah, parts of IMAP are clunky. But that's not enough reason to rip-and-replace it.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#52

Post by regularfry »

there wrote: post #20
gridspy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it requires is a major server (i.e gmail) providing it as an option and a major client (say a iPhone email app) supporting that option.

oh, that's all? it'll require an RFC or some other kind of standard, which will take a long time to finalize. then someone will have to write a reference spec server and client, then "real" versions in "real" languages, then get them both to the stability, security, and scalability of current imap clients and servers. then once big email providers (isps, google, etc.) start supporting it on the server end (gotta fact…

You've got it backwards. Standardisation happens after first implementation, not before. The article author can deliver this functionality into a popular-enough client without waiting for anyone else.

If the benefits turn out to be worth it, maybe it'll go somewhere.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#53

Post by regularfry »

jwhitlark wrote: post #35
pyre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. I agree with JSON over XML, but what about binary data? That is the weakest part of JSON, in my opinion. What binary data? All attachments in emails are Base64 encoded. That's what MIME is all about. > 6. how about SHA-1 hashes of content? Done properly, that would eliminate any duplicate messages, and could make it very easy to include other messages. This might also allow content to be transfered between accou…

>> 3. ugh. Hadn't realized that. I like IMAP even less, now. (Told you I didn't know much about MIME ;-) >> 6. I wasn't intending it as a security mechanism, but as a way to know which bits you have and which you don't. Do you think SHA-1 is still a bad idea in that case?

>> 6.

That is a security mechanism. If I can inject a message with a hash that collides with something else in your queue, I can at least prevent you from seeing the original, or potentially spoof a message from someone else.

I know it depends on knowing hashes of other messages in the mailbox, but if the hashes are supposed to persist, that might not be a problem.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#54

Post by regularfry »

dlsspy wrote: post #34

> All data that's ever sent to or received from the server would be in JSON format. JSON is much more human-readable than XML. I don't need my protocols to be human readable. I need my computers to read them and know that I've got good, bug-free, reusable, efficient, and easy-to understand implementations. This isn't an argument for XML over JSON -- I've made good use of both, but I don't want to consider how easy it…

As far as I'm concerned, the argument for JSON over XML is that the parser should be much lighter. No bloody entities to worry about, for a start.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#55

Post by sorbits »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #26
ajross wrote: post #2

Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms. A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusi…

But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusional. As is believing that it's about spam (or probably believing it all, for that matter, but let's stay on topic). I don't understand people bitching about spam in 2010. I have probably a dozen email addresses that I publish all over the web and I get maybe one spam message a month. I get way more…

I don’t understand people declare the spam problem solved.

I have had false positives with every single spam filter I have tried. This is unacceptable when running a business, and if we manually have to double-check hundreds of spams each day, what is the point of the filter?

Additionally we spend hours each week working with users who do not receive our emails because of spam filters unknown to them (many believe the fault is ours).

It is 2010 and spam is still a major problem.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#56

Post by webignition »

nfnaaron wrote: post #3

I can't say whether his implementation makes sense. Regardless, I would like to see public key encryption of all email. There's no reason why messages should be plain text anywhere except at the two ends. I realize key management would be a problem, but it's probably a solvable problem. The solution would have to allow most people to be practically unaware of encryption issues.

Encryption of all email would make intermediary virus scanning impossible and spam scanning next to impossible.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#57

Post by AndrewDucker »

Nwallins wrote: post #47
eitally wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intended point about pigeonholes can sometimes backfire within the context of email. Consider a Gmail user who sends a query to a number of different recipients, expecting unique replies from each. Gmail, because of the like headers, will group all of the responses into the parent conversation. Let's say the users tags the first response with a label corresponding to that sender, and then the second response com…

> and then the second response comes in. At this point, the user is at an "oh shit" moment, finally comprehending the implications of Google's labeling I am having trouble understanding what the problem is, here. I also suspect this may be a Gmail problem rather than a tagging problem.

It's tagging a conversation rather than tagging an email.

I frequently put different emails from the same conversation in different folders, because they contain different types of information that I need to do different things with.

GMail will not let you do that.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#58

Post by tbrownaw »

sorbits wrote: post #55
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusional. As is believing that it's about spam (or probably believing it all, for that matter, but let's stay on topic). I don't understand people bitching about spam in 2010. I have probably a dozen email addresses that I publish all over the web and I get maybe one spam message a month. I get way more…

I don’t understand people declare the spam problem solved. I have had false positives with every single spam filter I have tried. This is unacceptable when running a business, and if we manually have to double-check hundreds of spams each day, what is the point of the filter? Additionally we spend hours each week working with users who do not receive our emails because of spam filters unknown to them (many believe th…

> if we manually have to double-check hundreds of spams each day, what is the point of the filter?

It's faster to scan a list of subject lines and senders than to look at the contents of an email, which is faster than actually deleting it. So verifying that the spam filter sorted your emails correctly is faster than sorting every message yourself.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#59

Post by cturner »

You could implement this as a service on top of couchdb. The oreilly couchdb book that has just been released shows examples of developing apps using the javascript engine that's inside couchdb. You'd get easy access to some functionality by doing this - tagging, email versioning.

Re: How to Replace IMAP

#60

Post by graywh »

Skeuomorph wrote: post #29

First, I love reMail. Gabor breathes email and search. If you own an iPhone and use Gmail or Google Apps, get reMail--you'll thank him. That said, it's easy to skim this article and nod, "Yeah! Yeah!", but when we're discussing these, laymen may need to know a few of these seem over-simplified. > "TCP connections are great, but for transferring large amounts of email securely, HTTP is the way to go." 1. http://wiki.a…

Having had to resort to http://github.com/rgrove/larch recently to move a decade of email onto Google Apps because Thunderbird was putting new IDs on each moved message, I fully agree this problem is evil.

What version? This doesn't happen to me on 2.0.0.23

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